Global Mobile Apps in July | AI Creatives Help Web Novel Apps Climb the Charts, While New Micro-Drama Apps Rise to Prominence Through Sweet Romance

Four developments stood out across the July rankings:

• Web novel apps accelerated user-acquisition spending, with several products reaching prominent advertising positions.
• FlareFlow entered the leading group after deploying roughly 130,000 advertising creatives during the month.
• NetShort recorded strong download growth, rising by more than 50% month over month.
• New anime releases helped Crunchyroll enter the lower end of the global mobile app revenue ranking.

Content Apps Dominate iOS While Android Remains More Diverse

The iOS advertising chart was heavily concentrated around content-driven products. Micro-drama and web novel apps occupied a large share of the leading positions, while newcomers including RocNovel, NovelaGo, and AnyStories moved into the upper ranks through aggressive advertising.

Android showed a broader category mix. Major e-commerce platforms such as Temu, SHEIN, and Alibaba.com remained highly visible, supported by high-frequency in-feed advertising across international markets.

RocNovel began running international advertising campaigns in November 2024. July 2025 marked its first appearance in SocialPeta's global mobile app ranking.

SocialPeta's July advertising data showed:

• Approximately 260,000 deduplicated creatives were deployed across iOS and Android.
• Newly launched creatives represented more than 65.4% of the total.
• Advertising covered 74 countries and regions.
• The United States contributed more than 81.9%, followed by the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia.
• Video accounted for around 72.94% of newly launched creatives.

RocNovel's stronger creatives emphasized immediate emotional conflict. Common themes included betrayal, crying, pregnancy, and confrontations. Voiceovers and subtitles were used to communicate the plot quickly, allowing viewers to understand the central conflict within a short creative.

One heavily distributed July creative centered on a distressed heroine discovering a dramatic betrayal involving her husband and sister.

AnyStories had already been advertising on Android since 2020, while its iOS campaigns began later, in August 2024. By the time of this July analysis, cumulative deduplicated creatives across both platforms had exceeded 419,000.

Its July 2025 campaign activity included:

• Around 102,000 deduplicated creatives across iOS and Android.
• Advertising in 77 countries and regions.
• The United States, Canada, Australia, and Germany were among the app's major advertising markets.
• Video represented approximately 98.64% of July creatives.

A notable feature of AnyStories' campaign was its heavy use of AI-generated video. Recurring visual ideas included fantasy creatures, exaggerated transformations, muscular male characters, supernatural wolves, and highly dramatic scenes involving vulnerable protagonists.

FlareFlow was one of July's fastest-rising micro-drama products. The platform only began advertising in April 2025, yet reached a leading global position after little more than three months of campaign activity.

According to SocialPeta's July data:

• FlareFlow ran approximately 134,000 deduplicated creatives across iOS and Android.
• Its campaigns reached 78 countries and regions.
• North America, Europe, and South America accounted for much of its advertising activity.
• Roughly 400 micro-drama titles were promoted during July.
• Newly added dramas represented approximately 74% of promoted titles.
• Local productions made up only around 11.15% of the newly launched dramas.

The most heavily promoted title was Surrender to My Dominant Doctor. Its story follows a heroine trying to finance her father's surgery who becomes entangled with Sebastian, a wealthy and emotionally distant heir. Their initial encounter develops into a romance.

The campaign illustrates a formula that was proving effective for new global micro-drama platforms: combine an immediately recognizable wealthy or dominant male lead with high-stakes personal circumstances and a straightforward romantic payoff.

App Store Download Highlights

NetShort continued to perform strongly in the micro-drama category. Seven of its titles appeared among the month's Top 20 dramas by popularity. 30 Years Frozen, 3 Brothers Regret ranked first among those titles with a heat index of approximately 1.71 million. NetShort's downloads increased by more than 50% month over month.

Prime Video also benefited from a stronger July content slate. Releases included the action-comedy film Heads of State, helping downloads increase by approximately 25% month over month and moving Prime Video to No.18 in the App Store download ranking.

Google Play Download Highlights

Pinterest had been testing an AI-powered feature called auto-collages, designed to turn product catalogs into shoppable collage-style content for advertisers. Pinterest appeared at No.19 on the July Google Play download chart.

Indian social-commerce platform Meesho also entered the Top 20. Attention around its return-to-India corporate restructuring, IPO filing, and unified rebranding coincided with a 16.7% month-over-month increase in downloads.

App Store Revenue Highlights

Crunchyroll expanded its anime catalog during July with releases including Gachiakuta and Dandadan 2. The additional content helped the platform reach No.19 in the App Store revenue ranking.

TikTok announced further expansion of its Add to Music App feature through integration with YouTube Music. At the time of the article, TikTok said the feature had already produced hundreds of millions of song saves that translated into billions of music streams.

Google Play Revenue Highlights

Twitch appeared in the Google Play revenue Top 20 during a month packed with major community events. From June 24 through July 17, 2025, Twitch ran its Summer Drops Fest, offering viewers benefits such as in-game rewards, PC Game Pass time, and subscription-related perks.

TwitchCon activity ran alongside the campaign, drawing participation from streamers and fans. The combination of live events, creator engagement, and promotional rewards helped keep the platform highly visible during the period.

1. Web novel advertising became more competitive. RocNovel, AnyStories, and other reading products pushed substantial volumes of new creatives into international markets.
2. Video remained central to story-driven acquisition. RocNovel leaned heavily toward video, while almost all of AnyStories' July creatives used video formats.
3. AI-generated imagery was already entering performance creative workflows. AnyStories used surreal and transformation-focused AI video concepts as a recurring component of its advertising strategy.
4. New micro-drama platforms could scale quickly through a large creative supply. FlareFlow reached leading advertising positions only a few months after beginning paid acquisition.
5. Fresh entertainment content continued to influence app performance. Prime Video, Crunchyroll, NetShort, and Twitch each benefited from active content, releases, or event-driven engagement during July.

July's rankings show how creative volume, content supply, localization, and timely entertainment releases can influence mobile app advertising, downloads, and monetization in different ways. Monitoring these signals together gives marketers a clearer picture of how competitors are acquiring and retaining users across global markets.